Careful screening and genetic-based testing for new blood-borne viruses such as West Nile and possibly severe acute respiratory syndrome should help safeguard the nation's blood supply, Marsha J. Evans, the national president of the American Red Cross, said Wednesday.
Local hospitals could end up paying the price, a blood bank official said, and more donors could be ruled ineligible, which will hurt blood supplies further.
Ms. Evans visited the local chapter of the Red Cross on Wednesday and headlined an awards luncheon for the Central Savannah River Council of Girl Scouts. Ms. Evans was the executive director of the Girl Scouts before going to the Red Cross.
"This is a very special visit," she said, adding that it gave her a chance to combine her interests.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that West Nile had been inadvertently passed through some organ and blood donations.
Although there is no definitive test, the Food and Drug Administration will now allow blood centers to use nucleic acid amplification testing to screen blood for West Nile virus. The test, which looks for genetic evidence of a virus, is already used to screen blood for hepatitis C and HIV.
"We're very excited about that because that's just another one of the safety measures that the American Red Cross and other blood banks across the country take to make sure that we're doing everything humanly possible to ensure the safety and the quality of the blood that we acquire," Ms. Evans said.
Both Shepeard Community Blood Center and Red Cross Blood Services of South Carolina, which supply the Augusta area, plan to begin the testing July 1. The problem will be the added cost, which will be considerable, said Dr. Volker Dube, Shepeard's medical director. One estimate put it at $5 per unit, about a 4 percent increase, he said.
"The cost will have to be absorbed by our hospitals," Dr. Dube said.
It will be difficult for hospitals, which may have negotiated contracts for prices with insurance companies, to pass that along, too, he said.
Such an increase could have a significant impact on Doctors Hospital, which last year spent more than $1 million on blood products from Shepeard, said John Doriot, the hospital's director of diagnostic services.
"Technology - it's better for everybody in the long run, but it's not free," he said.
The increase could cost University Hospital about $60,000 more a year, but that expense has to be weighed against the need to help patients avoid the virus, said Chief Financial Officer Robert Taylor.
"The financial issue isn't even material when you're talking about something like that," he said.
Of added concern, the impact of SARS in Asian countries, though still small, could mean excluding another part of a shrinking donor pool, said Steve Maness, CEO of Red Cross Blood Services of South Carolina. That could mean losing 1 percent of donors, which is significant, he said.
"It squeezes us more," he said.
Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tomc@augustachronicle.com.
